Over the past three years, that state has put on a political drama over taxes that makes Florida's 2000 election brouhaha look like dinner theater. Like Florida's, Tennessee's tax structure is built around the sales tax. Faced with crippling revenue shortfalls and a tax system that simply won't sustain a modern state government, a Republican governor, Don Sundquist, and a Democratic House Speaker, Jimmy Naifeh, made common cause in an effort to do the right thing. In Tennessee's case, that meant an income tax. The effort was all the more surprising because Sundquist had flown almost exclusively with his right wing during his political career, and Naifeh is a good-old-boy, pro-business Democrat who'd built a reputation for a lot of things that didn't include principled stands on big issues.
The public was treated to spectacle after spectacle as various crises and deliberations played out: Sundquist had to close all but a few state parks for several months when money ran low. Anti-tax demonstrators, egged on by talk radio hosts, took to circling the Capitol in Nashville in their cars, air horns blaring. Once a group charged the Capitol and broke a few windows. Naifeh got death threats. The Capitol police put on riot gear when lawmakers were in session. The mention of Sundquist's name at public events like Tennessee Titans games began to prompt choruses of boos.
Naifeh ultimately came within a vote or so of getting the income tax passed in the House, but everything fell apart when a few of his allies chickened out and one committed suicide (after being arrested in Florida for exposing himself). Eventually, the Legislature opted to tread the least painful path, upped the sales tax by a penny to 7% and laid the matter to rest for a year or so, with some talking of holding a statewide constitutional forum on taxes.
This isn't an allegory for why Florida needs an income tax, which our constitution forbids and which in any event would be an even more radioactive proposition here in Florida than it has been in Tennessee. But there are at least a couple of observations to be made based on where Tennessee has been and where Florida is going.
One is that Florida is in financial trouble at both the state and local levels. The train that Ronald Reagan set in motion of passing down spending decisions to the next political level has run out of stops. Around Florida, communities like Hollywood and Daytona Beach are dipping into reserve funds and having to consider big tax increases. As we report elsewhere in this issue, the state will enter the legislative session next year at least $2 billion in the hole.
Slap on the cost of the amendments for class-size, pre-k and tinkering with the higher-ed system; start to figure in the local court costs the state has to assume and a few more million for last election's priceless good idea, the bullet train ... the choices start to get interesting.
Raising taxes is, of course, the political last option of choice, but this time around it's going to be very hard to find things to cut because the fat's just about all gone from the state budget. The recent events at the Department of Children and Families involve issues of management but also matters of arithmetic -- too many kids and seniors, too few of those we hire to protect them. Talk about more cuts and you're into some very cynical calculus on how many foster kids you think it's OK for the state to lose track of, and how big you'd like the waiting list to be for senior citizens needing low-cost assistance to stay in their homes rather than move to a nursing home. As we also report in this issue, that waiting list is now more than 15,000 strong.
The second observation is that Florida has to do better than Tennessee did in addressing its problems. Tennessee bought itself a couple of years by raising its sales tax by a penny, but it'll probably be back in crisis before the next governor's term is over. If the next session of the Florida Legislature -- or the one after it -- ends only with some combination of a sales tax increase and further service cuts, it's a failure. The Legislature -- the full Legislature -- simply has to take some strong action to provide the state with a broad-based tax structure that's as modern as the economy the state is moving toward. The lack of such action is a big reason for the vacuum that's now sucking a number of unwise amendments into the state's constitution. I don't think real reform can or should come from the super-Legislature the voters may create if they approve Amendment 5 (which they shouldn't).
The third observation involves leadership. A former newspaper colleague of mine, Phil Ashford, now writes for a publication called the Nashville Scene, a fine alternative weekly in that city. He wrote a column about Naifeh in which he said something I think is true: Politicians run for office "promising -- and privately hoping -- to try and do good." Over time, however, they succumb to their survival instincts, ducking tough issues in the interest of winning the next election. "Some politicians," he wrote, "give their entire careers over to waiting for their moment to finally make a stand."
Naifeh and Sundquist, Ashford believed, found that moment. And last session, Sen. John McKay, on the cusp of term limits, found it when he stepped up and fought for tax reform in Florida. Our state's circumstances will require more than one leader who isn't willing to take the easy way out. Tennessee, if nothing else, can offer some lessons in political nerve.